Let's see if they can repeat that for a few more years.
That's not going to happen unless they do something to match September 08 every year. If you look at the % month on month rise in .pros registered from September 08 onwards it was 125%, 28%, 14%, 9%, 8%, 5%, and if they only went up from 34,000 to 36,000 between February 09 and June 09, that growth has disappeared.
Realistically, without price promotion, total .pros registered will fall at the end of 09 when late volume registrants realise they have little chance of selling their domains. Older volume registrants will stay in because they have stronger .pros and current renewal fees are still a big improvement on pre-08 prices, the problem is there aren't many of them, you can count them on the palm of your hand.
The problem is RegistryPro are still selling to 10% of people who are professionally qualified through 10% of registrars and of the 1% of domain registrants they are targeting, only 1% would consider registering a .pro as opposed to a .com, .net, org, .info etc. It's a 1 in 10,000 problem.
RegistryPro's financial problems are unchanged. Before September 08, they were getting 7,000 x $50 per year, now they are getting 36,000 x $10. It's nowhere near enough to cover their costs. Hostway will surely not sign up for another 5 years of losing money in May 2010 with the prospect of a raft of new gTLD wiping out any strategic benefit of subsidising losses on .pro. That could be the end of .pro or ICANN might remove residual restrictions to persuade another registry to take it on. If Afilias or Verisign take on .pro with no restrictions, it would be beneficial to registrants. I would advise .pro registrants not to renew past May 2010 unless they have to until the registry contract issue is resolved.
The problem with .PRO (and I have several), of course, is that the prohibitions on who can get it are going to keep it down, period. And the *only* reason to get a .PRO, IMO is if you can get a really strong keyword domain, and those will be taken by and large long before .PRO ever becomes a big phenomenon.
I agree, you buy or register a .pro or any new extension to get a good keyword. There is only so far new extensions can get because the good keywords run out. The only way to go then is to bring prices down to a dollar like Afillias did to keep people regging.
Having said that, and owning some .PRO domains, I don't see any reason not to develop a .PRO domain and let the appeal of what the domain name looks like in a search engine search help get some organic traffic to it.
I reviewed the .pros in the Best of .pro final. The highest ranked site BanquetTables.pro was on Page 4 of Google. I bought a 1998 registered .com for about $3,000 1-2 years ago, I did 2 hours of work on a simple 1 pages site one Sunday afternoon to test the SEO potential, and it made the first page of Google last week for a couple of days before falling back to page 2. The 2 word phrase gets searched for 1,200 per month in the UK, and while I was on page 1 of google I was getting about 10-15 hits per day. That worked out to 1 or 2 clicks on my ads per day and Googles pays out 30 cents up to $1.20 in terms of what Google pays out.
The reason people don't develop .pros is because although Google doesn't directly discriminate against alternative extensions, they give you a boost for a domain that has been registered continually for 11 years like my .com. I doubt many .pros are getting much organic traffic, BanquetTables.pro probably gets very little click through from Google. Most .pro sites that get traffic are probably getting it through other sources. My highest traffic .pros are Guitar.pro and Uniform.pro, I think both have been developed before so I'm getting traffic from old backlinks.
Re-selling .PRO is going to be hard, because who are you going to sell a.PRO domain to? You take a small list of interested buyers and then have to find an even smaller number of those who are qualified from within that.
For certain keywords, none of your potential buyers are going to be professionally qualified so you have little chance of selling to an end user. You have to find a domainer who is professionally qualified who can develop and has an interest in the keyword, it's like looking for a needle in a haystack.
I'm glad registry.pro is lowering their prices, but it would help if they lowered their philosophical entry threshold as well and admit that the standards of snootiness they hoped the TLD would sustain are just too limiting to be economically viable.
I agree with your conclusion, only allowing professionally qualified people to register .pro is not economically viable. 90% of registrars by volume have voted on this point by not offering .pro. It will be interesting to see what happens in May 2010 when the registry contract is due for renewal. If I was Catherine Sigmar, my conditions for extending the contract would be the removal of all restrictions, if .pro is going to continue as a restricted extension it needs to be managed by Verisign because RegistryPro cannot possibly make it pay and that hurts registrants because .pro doesn't get promoted properly.
The interesting fact is that most of them are in the hands of speculators.
36,000 .pros in total is neither here nor there in the grand scheme of things so the fact that a large proportion of those are held by speculators is small potatoes. 266,000 .asia were registered in 24 hours at landrush, that's serious speculation. 60m .coms are probably held speculatively. Every domain ever sold was presumably held speculatively.
There are different types of speculation, when I was building my .pro collection, I was speculating that I'd have more time to develop in future so I'd need more domains, I was speculating that .com prices would carry on rising and since most web sites don't make much money it's not worth overpaying for .coms, I was speculating that I would have children one day and get them interested in web design and development and pass on my .pro domains to them, I was speculating that RegistryPro would go out of business if it carried on mismanaging .pro so restrictions would have to be eased or removed, I was speculating that .pro was more inherently brandable than other gTLDs so with the right registry, it could relatively outperform, I was speculating that maybe I would sell 1 or 2 .pros each year 5-10 years from now, and it would cover my registration fees or pay for a family holiday when I was strapped for cash.
The whole economic system is based on speculation of some kind. People buy a home to live in but they love talking about the value of it going up. People pay into annuities, expecting the value of the fund to go up over time. All forms of investment are speculation. Investment is just a term given to speculation to make it sound less risky and more scientific so people get to charge other people for doing in on their behalf. Without speculation, most domains would have no value, speculation restricts supply and pushes up prices. Speculation is good thing, it's a registry's best friend, .pro would be better off with 100 times more speculation. Non-speculators who buy 1 .pro to lovingly develop would be better off with more speculation because RegistryPro would collect more fees and have money to spend on marketing, then when you ask for that backlink for your 1 lovingly developed .pro grand opus or hand out a gold leaf embossed business card with RinkyDink.pro on, established with a clean non-speculative conscience in 2009, fewer people will say, .pro, what the f&%k is that?!
